The next shot at the White House is years away, the Senate is firmly in Democratic hands and Rove is no longer the universally respected strategic hand he once was. That’s all left the Republicans — who, like Democrats, have seen their central party infrastructure weaken — without a consensus figure to interpret what the election meant.

And the current crop of elected officials, uncertain of where the Republican electorate actually stands after a cycle of widely off-base polling, appears gun-shy.

There’s a split between those who believe the party’s problem is cosmetic, those who believe it’s data-based and those who think it’s ideological and policy-based. Within those camps, there’s no common ground on what a better approach would look like.

“If you’ve at least defined and everybody’s accepted the reasons why the election went so poorly, that’s just a critical starting point,” said David Winston, a veteran Republican pollster who does survey-taking for the House GOP caucus.

The post-mortems are playing out against the backdrop of budgetary fights that have become the Washington version of Groundhog Day — a deadline approaches, both sides blame the other, the president uses the bully pulpit to flog the opposition and polls show the Republican brand sliding further into a hole.

The constant drama, a number of Republicans say, has denied the party writ large a chance to take stock amid calm. Still, the Republican National Committee is moving ahead with what Chairman Reince Priebus has at times called an “autopsy” into 2012.

Its review of what happened last cycle is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks, and other players such as the Koch brothers are conducting their own dissection.

Winston said he hopes and assumes that the RNC critique will “define what went wrong so you can get everybody focused on what the solution should look like.”

And across newspapers and cable news flow a stream of center-right versus conservative-right stories, a perennial battle within the party but one that’s seen new heat in the past four months. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was not invited to speak at CPAC, but Mitt Romney was — and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is angry about it, goes one storyline.

“I think there will always be tension between moderates in the party and the conservative base, but that has existed for decades and only goes away after we win an election. It went away for a bit after Reagan, and it went away for a bit after Bush 41,” said conservative strategist Greg Mueller. “But in losing,” he added, “it’s back with some intensity.”

Democrats, too, went through spasms of revolt and recrimination after a presidential loss — most recently in 2000 and 2004.